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HISTORY AND MATERIALISM 



BY 
ALFRED H. LLOYD 



REPRINTEli FROM THE 



§immatt Jiiisit^wat §mm 



Vol. X No. 4 JULY, 1905 



[Reprinted from The American Historical Review, Vol. X., No. 4, July, 1905.] 



HISTORY AND MATERIALISM 



IS history losing its human character and interest? Is it becoming 
more and more a natural science, a mere record of natural 
causes and effects, less and less a story, artistic and dramatic, of 
what men and nations by dint of the will and might and coursing 
blood within them have now and again achieved? Is it no longer 
a humanity, a great human document, a stirring, living picture of 
what living, breathing, failing, and triumphing men are and do, 
but instead a gathering of just so many puppet illustrations from 
the manifold happenings and doings in human experience for some 
natural law or philosophical formula? Some people have detected 
such changes as these, and certainly the historian's growing empha- 
sis on material conditions, on climate, geographical location, natural 
resources, and the like, would give color to the idea, while his resort 
to prosaic minutize of all sorts, to statistics and to psychological 
laws, that seem human only through the accidents of association, 
would greatly deepen the color already given. In short, in the 
opinion of many, who appear to be at least not without some justi- 
fication, history is in great danger of materialism, even of gross 
materialism. Moreover, its indifference to ethical values, which is 
surely increasing and which doubtless springs from the companion- 
ship, fortunate or unfortunate, of history -with the natural sciences, 
is very often thought itself to be quite enough to make this opinion 
a conviction. 

But materialism is an epithet that demands most careful scrutiny. 
It may be wholly just ; it may be even unqualifiedly opprobrious ; yet 
its easy use and its wide use at the present time, though possibly 
emphasizing its justice, at least suggest that there may be, if not 

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. X. 47. ( 72/ ) 



728 A. H. Lloyd 

ako that there must be, something besides opprobium in it. Surely 
history has the comfort and assurance of a large company in its 
misery. Education, for example, is also charged with materialism ; 
the mechanical arts are crowding the pure sciences, and the pure 
sciences the humanities and culture-studies ; college presidents, in- 
stead of being the moral teachers and great spiritual leaders of fifty 
or seventy-five years ago, either are not filling their places or are 
hardly more than financial agents and business managers. Again, 
politics has lost its quondam patriotism and turned to individualism, 
that often becomes sordid selfishness, and to cosmopolitanism, that 
serves as an excuse for the declining devotion to country. Religion 
has set class against class, has made much of fine music and various 
other forms of sensuous display, very little of true piety, or, aban- 
doning church and creed and ritual altogether, has turned in theory 
to nature and in practice to settlement-work, to slumming, and — 
with apologies to Professor Cooley and others for this use of the 
word — to " sociology ". Fiction is realistic even to the point of 
being sensuously offensive ; problematic and prurient to indecency. 
Poetry, even if we forget the verse of Whitman, has abused its 
great privileges, turning freedom into flagrancy and license. And 
against them all, education and politics and religion and literature, 
as well as against history, we hear the people raising the alarm of 
materialism. Yet, as was said, a charge so easily and so generally 
made calls for close scrutiny, since a well-nigh universal fault may, 
if not must, have some praise mingled with its opprobrium. To say 
the least, all creatures, among whom I would boast m}-self one. who 
have an abiding faith in the so-called human " verities ", must be- 
lieve that what is general or universal has some positive virtue in it, 
and in particular that this commonly resented materialism of his- 
tory, so thoroughly up-to-date, so well in line with the movement 
of things all along the front of man's experience, can be after all 
only the entrance of the human element in history into a rich and a 
full inheritance. 

But materialism — what is it really? ^^^lat is it quite apart from 
the hue and cry with which as an epithet it has been cast about so 
promiscuously? What is it, when relieved of the relative, partizan 
meaning from which, like any other epithet that has become a fad, 
it has undoubtedly suft'ered? I suggest the following definition. 
Materialism is the tendency, which may have all degrees of ex- 
pression, in life or in thought to treat what is only a part as if in 
itself it were an independent, self-supporting, originally active, and 
originally constituted whole. Thus the groat tost for reality that 
materialism employs as it walks up and down the world hunting 



History and Materialism 729 

for real things is what the logicians know as self-identity, but what 
here, not unappreciatively, we may call lonesomeness or isolation 
or touch-me-not existence ; in a word, unrelatedness or the character 
of being and acting wholly to and in oneself. True, ordinarily, even 
by the sophisticated, the term materialism has been applied only 
to the lonesomeness, the lonesome reality of matter, but no term can 
ever be held, for its full meaning, to its ordinary application. Idealism, 
spiritualism, supernaturalism, are also virtually materialistic. The 
mere names which they have chosen to give to their selected proteges 
in the realm of reality do not avoid, they only very imperfectly 
conceal the real materialism of their standpoint. The head of the 
ostrich may be hidden, but more than enough is still left exposed to 
disclose the animal and its true character. God may be a " spirit ", 
■but if the spirit that he is is something off by itself, something in- 
dependent and quite sui generis, being and acting quite to and in 
itself or when to and in other things then only miraculously and 
arbitrarily, and if what is material, physical, worldly, is wholly ex- 
ternal to his spiritual nature, being at most or at best only temporal 
and mediate and dependent, then to all intents and purposes he is as 
material as the matter that so spiritually he, or his worshipers for 
him, would once for all reject. Again, man may have a "' soul ", 
but if his soul is, so to speak, only one more ingredient of his nature, 
only one more of the many things in his body, if it is, as sometimes 
considered, the peculiar, distinctly localized function of just one of 
his organs, say the much overworked pineal gland, then it too is 
physical in fact, whatever it may be in name, and the materialism 
which fosters it can even give points to the materialism which dis- 
dains its only verbal disguises. The hidden thing is always more 
flagrant than what is open and avowed. 

So, as was said, materialism is the tendency, having all degrees 
of expression and, to add to the definition, having also all degrees 
of candor or concealment, to treat what is only a part as if in itself 
it were an independent, self-supporting whole. In illustration, this 
definition makes materialism include, among many other things, 
the miser's habit or anj'body's miserly habit of taking the means 
to action for its end, and the spendthrift-reformer's habit or any- 
body's reckless if not fanatical habit of taking the end of action for 
its means; but it applies also to a standpoint, very general in its 
nature, that without mention might go quite unnoticed. Thus, over 
and over again men have obstinately regarded the whole of anything 
as if somehow it were external to its own parts. They have, for 
example, treated society and its individual members ; nature — wit- 
ness the doctrine, as often rendered, of natural selection — and all 



730 A. H. Lloyd 

living things ; reality, which is said to be absolute and eternal and 
all-inclusive, and the component parts of reality, which are only 
relative and transitory ; the personality of God and those human per- 
sons who are supposed to live and move and have their being in 
God ; finally, history and the people or the nations of history ; all these 
wholes, I say, and their parts they have treated as exclusive of each 
other, as representing different orders of being, as having dift'erent 
relations to space and time, to character and activity. Such a view, 
however, clearly comes under the definition of materialism, since it 
does but make the separate whole, the whole that like society or 
nature or reality or history is so distinct from its own constituent 
parts, only one more part in some still larger whole. Accordingly, 
to make the definition safely explicit, materialism is hypostasis of the 
part, that is, elevation of the part to the dignity of an independent 
whole, or — and in the end this comes to the same thing — h3-postasis 
of the whole, that is, treatment of the whole as if it were something 
quite by itself, in short, as if it were only another distinct part. 

And with this simple, yet certainly very inclusive as well as very 
significant idea of materialism in mind it is now possible, in the first 
place, to determine in just what ways the study of history may be 
materialistic, and then, in conclusion, to decide in just what measure 
the charge of materialism against the tendencies in the historical 
study of the present day can be sustained. Before entering, however, 
upon these two undertakings, let me say that I shall claim the privi- 
lege of being at times quite commonplace. Especially, I shall not 
be discountenanced or embarrassed if anybody is prompted to accuse 
me of attacking only straw-historians or only a straw-history. In 
general, straw-men, or at least men so described under the storm 
and stress of criticism, have in the past been attacked not without 
great profit, and in particular my own present interest is primarilv 
a logical one. I am not taking up a cudgel against anybody or any- 
thing. The mere logic of a situation, however commonplace in some 
of its details and however apparently vain or empty in some of its 
implied criticisms, is to my mind always well v.-orth careful formu- 
lation. 

II. 

So, to begin with the general question as to how under the defi- 
nition history may be materialistic, I would mention and at greater 
or less length discuss the following marks. For the first, according 
to a popular idea, which even the professional, sophisticated historian 
has sometimes allowed himself, history is said, or, if not said, is 
supposed to repeat itself. Witness, not of course the real, but the 



History and Materialism 731 

imagined, univocal use of such terms, so necessary to all historical 
study, as monarchy, democracy, individualism, labor, property, 
money, city, country, people, nation, and the like indefinitely. Down 
through all the ages these terms are often applied, now here, now 
there, with little if any regard to the qualitative variation that his- • 
tory can hardly fail to induce in all its incidents, in all the things to 
which the terms themselves refer. The historian, whose history 
thus repeats itself, will doubtless have a great variety of different 
elements out of which to construct his historical edifice, but he can 
produce at best only a scaffolding, not a real history, if he is blind 
to the truth — is it not a truth ? — that here and there, now and then, 
on larger scale and on smaller scale are more than mere distinctions 
of space and time and quantity. To assume, then, that they are not 
more is plainly materialistic, since it is to give fixity, independence, 
isolation, to each and every repeating thing, to each thing and every- 
thing that is manifolded in space or time or that in its numerous man- 
ifestations has now one size and now another. What would we, nay, 
what do we think of the novelist whose characters only move about, 
get older, and become larger or smaller in body perhaps or in prop- 
erty or number of exploits, and then die or get married? We may 
not call him names, being — as always we should be — personally 
charitable, and being ready to congratulate him on the momentary 
increase in his bank-account, but his novel we call wooden. And 
with the same meaning an only self-repeating history, though com- 
positely very complex and though put together with the ingenuity 
of a master-mechanic and though with samples of its peculiar wares 
in all sizes, we call materialistic. 

Yet do not misunderstand me. I am far from intending to say 
that there can be no meaning in the idea that history repeats itself. 
Among others. Professor Gabriel Tarde'- has succeeded in giving 
a very rich meaning to the repetitions or imitations of history, but 
his meaning and in general the meaning is not materialistic ; also it 
is not the common intention of the adage, or the principle, that his- 
tory repeats itself. 

A subtle form of the historian's use of this principle has been 
his judgment of absolutism or wealth or progress or general pros- 
perity or anarchy from some assumed standard, naturally the stand- 
ard determined by his own life and time. Here, instead of the 
present being a repetition of the past, the past is taken, so to speak, 
as ideally, if not actually, repeating the present. The past is judged, 

^ hes Lois de I'hnitation (3d ed., Paris, 1900) ; translated into English from 
the second French edition by Elsie Clews Parsons : The Laws of Imitation (New 
York, 1903). 



732 A. H. Lloyd 

and in consequence is naturally found very much wanting, as if it 
could have been and so should have been what the present has 
become. In ethical judgments of historical periods this form of 
the offense, if offense I ought to call it, has been especially common 
"and of course has been frequently recognized and ridiculed, but the 
judgments of such other repeating or recurrent incidents or move- 
ments as democracy, the labor question, centralization, empire, and 
the like have been given to the same practice. 

The highly logical historian, moreover, who being formula-bound 
sees history as only a gathering of illustrations of the working of 
his special strait-jacket, is guilty of the same materialism ; and so 
also is his counterpart for whom history is only a multiplication of 
facts that may have no other unity save their association in space 
or time. A history of merely numerable diff'erences is not less a 
monotone than that of the logician's formula. 

But, secondly, the history that repeats itself has usually if not 
always been also a history of the swinging pendulum t}-pe. Its 
repetition, in other words, has been double-striped. Religion and 
irreligion, prosperity and depression, government and anarchy, 
socialism and individualism have followed each other with com- 
mendable regularity and perfect rhythmical precision. Day and 
night have not been more regular nor, as most people regard their 
coming and going, have they made a more thrilling historical 
progression. Vibration such as this is doubtless a great thing and 
it shows a great law, but all the more, because it is vibration as well 
as repetition, it really changes that upon which it acts or through 
which it is expressed. A new day is the day past neither in its time 
or date nor in its content of life and event ; the light that seems to 
return with its dawning is not the same and makes vision for eyes 
that are not the same. A return from socialism to individualism, in 
like manner, or from depression to prosperity, or from irreligion to 
religion, is always, so to speak, an advance, or at least a positive 
change, as well as a return. Even a pendulum never swings back 
to its old position. If it did, perpetual motion would be a possibility, 
and qualitative variation, wdiich is as important in physics as it is 
in history, would become at once impossible. jMoreover, the pendu- 
lum historian materialistically forgets, or is certainly very likely to 
forget, that both swings, both movements of the vibration, are bound 
to be throughout as coincident and as contemporaneous as day and 
night. The most that can be done, in order to keep them apart, is 
to distinguish between the visible and the invisible, the presented 
face and the antipodes of the globe of experience, the actual and the 
potential ; yet, even so distinguished, they are constantly changing 



History and Materialism "j^Z 

places, and neither one, however hidden and only potential, can ever 
be unreal. Do real realities only take turns at being real ? I suppose 
nobody enjoys paradoxes just for their own sake, but a pendulum- 
swinging history forces attention upon them. Thus, with a mean- 
ing that must be felt and recognized, just as back and forth or day 
and night are intimately involvedin each other, both always real and 
active, both parties to one and the same vmity of action, so in his- 
tory government and anarchy, prosperity and depression, religion 
and irreligion, individualism and socialism, are actively present in 
each other ; they are not the separate events of different years or 
decades or centuries. When any on? of these movements is most 
apparent, say in the institutions of the day, then look carefully and 
confidently for its opposite. Even when the night is darkest the day 
prepareth ; when the day is brightest the night cometh. 

As a third source of materialism in history I would mention the 
disposition to explam great chang'es as " reactions ". That the 
reactions of history are naturally incident to the vibrations and the 
repetitions hardly needs to be said, except in so far as it serves to 
indicate what on the whole is meant by a reaction. So often we are 
told that when things get so bad that they simpl}' cannot get any 
worse, or so good perhaps that they have become unearthly and 
therefore unbearable, then a reaction sets in, the pendulum simply 
swinging the other way, and that with this change there appears 
what is purely negative with reference to things as they have been 
and positive only in terms of its own internal, self-centered making, 
but what at some earlier period had had a vigorous career upon the 
stage of reality. Thus the idea seems to be that a reaction in the 
first place wholly supplants something and in the second place 
without change or loss restores something else. Extremes, in other 
words, are supposed to beget their opposites — with all due apologies 
for the change of metaphor — out of a clear sky. Doubtless for such 
an idea there is some excuse. Is it not quite natural to identify the 
life of a society with its visible forms and establishments and through 
thick and thin to hold to the identification just so long as the forms 
and establishments appear to be unimpaired? And with this natural 
habit of mind when a change transpires,, must it not seem sudden 
and reactionary, as sudden, be it said, and as reactionary as the 
revivalistic " conversion " ? Again, is not the reaction, when it 
appears in power, impairing or even demolishing the forms and 
establishments which have stood so long, always the special labor of 
some distinct class or party? Accordingly must it not be as distinct 
and independent as the class that initiates and conducts it? Witness 
such commonplace illustrations as the French Revolution or the 



734 A. H. Lloyd 

injection of Christianity into a pagan civilization. What veritable 
" reactions " both of these were ! Only — and here the error or at 
least the materialism of this standpoint is disclosed — these illustra- 
tions are too commonplace for a safe argument. Of all the reactions 
in history they certainly were not begotten out of a clear sky. Actual 
conditions never so naturally precipitated results as the conditions 
in France and Europe and the conditions in the Roman world pre- 
cipitated those two great upheavals. A materialist may find only 
revolutions and only independent parties or factions carrying them 
on, but the facts are against his findings. Revolutions may be 
" reactionary ", but also they are always evolutional, the new which 
they bring being only an outgrowth of the old which it supplants, 
the manifestation of something that had been only implicit; and as 
for the parties that incite and direct them, suffice it to say that in 
society classes seem to exist only to expose each other's hidden ways, 
to make explicit each other's implicit thoughts and deeds, and that 
the factions which have managed revolutions have always learned 
all their best lessons from those whom they have attacked. 

So, to resume the counting, a fourth mark of materialism in 
history is the idea of progress. I almost said the conceit of prog- 
ress. At least what many mean, or think the>- mean, by progress is 
materialistic. Thus, consciously or conventionally, the historian is 
a perfectionist. Either he is actually conceiving or he writes and 
thinks of things in general as if he were conceiving a far distant 
goal of political peace, industrial integrity, and moral righteousness, 
say a heavenly kingdom to come, toward which a still — perhaps an 
always ? — imperfect humanity is making its slow, so ver}- slow, and 
uncertain, so very uncertain, pilgrimage. But why destroy the 
worth and power of perfection by such a hypostasis of it? Why, so 
materialistically, separate the ideal and the real, the end and the 
means of life? Again, the historian thinks, or writes as if he thought, 
history in its past achievements a record of mere eliminations and 
accretions, a growing out of and away from some things and 
toward and into other things. Possibly b}- so doing he compensates 
for the vibrations and repetitions that in themselves are so unpro- 
ductive ; one offense is often protected by another ; but can a vital, 
organic history proceed in such a way? Also can such a process, 
however manifold its successive stages, have any substantial worth ? 
Surely, if a man set out to walk from one town to another \\-ith a 
heavy load on his back and changed his burden at every cross-roads, 
no one would care ver\' much whether he ever reached his destina- 
tion. And, once more, the historian makes, or writes as if he made, 
invidious distinctions among the different periods of his history. 



History and Materialism 735 

Consider the conceit, or the convention, of modernism, of civilization, 
of occidentalism, of the ism, whatever its full name should be, that 
glorifies the period of the supremacy of the life and people of the 
north temperate zone. 

Consider also the more inclusive invidious distinctions between 
the present and the past or even between the future and the present. 
Perhaps no one thing is more the cause or source of these distinc- 
tions or for that matter of the general notion of progress than the 
well-known though frequently overlooked illusion of retrospection. 
Here, of course, is not the place for a psychological discourse on the 
perception of time or of the relations of the periods of time, but let 
it be said simply that the past of consciousness can never be the 
past of reality. No man can ever know the living past; one's very 
knowledge vivisects it to death ; one's knowledge, too, not only makes 
it dead, but also renders it the mere storehouse of the present, the 
different values of its wares being determined only by their chang- 
ing relations to interests that are more or less narrow and standards 
that are arbitrary as well as narrow in the life of the present. But, 
in view of these facts, how rash it is to derive an idea of progress 
from distinctions between the known past and the present ! When 
the knowledge of the past and the peculiar characterizations that 
are its burden are, as plainly they must be, part and parcel of the 
progress, how strange it is to take the known past for the real past, 
and through such a confusion to get a case for a progress of things 
outgrown and discarded or acquired and for a time appropriated ! 

So often and so wisely the historian himself exclaims that with 
every new period, almost with every new year, history needs to be 
rewritten. And why? Because the visible past, materially and 
ideally, that is, as to its constituent data and as to its meaning or 
value, is as changeable a thing as the restless present that views it. 
How, then, can one outgrow the past? Surely only as, or if, he can 
outrun his shadow. In short, the materialistic idea of progress, what 
with its perfectionism, its eliminations and accretions, and its in- 
vidious distinctions, is not only materialistic; it is also very like a 
superstition. Certainly, if real at all and substantial, progress must 
be an ever-present and a wholly present thing ; not something to be 
measured by a dead past or an unborn future, but instead something 
in which both past and future have their present Hving parts and 
so escape the ignominy or the flattery of the pharisaical epithets of 
less and more, worse and better, that a superstitious, unappreciative, 
self-deceived present would cast upon them. 

But, fifthly, the period, era, or epoch, as usually treated, whether 
consciously or conventionally, is materialistic. Of course, this is 



736 A. H. Lloyd 

not to sa)' that any one will seriously advocate a history of mere 
dates. Dated beginnings or endings of periods are no longer so 
much stressed as perhaps they have been in the past. Dates are 
now for man, not man for dates. The date-bounded period, or era, 
on the whole has lost vogue, if vogue it ever had, since materially 
and ideally it has always broken down its own fences. The ubiquity 
of the forerunner has been fatal to it. The certain growth of insight 
has given it only a relative value, turning its barriers into merely 
temporary structures set up merely as a means to new intellectual 
conquests over the domain of time. What has insight not done for 
the time-duration of paganism, Christianity, medievalism, modern- 
ism ! Everything in history has indeed had its forerunner ; and 
insight, discovering the universal forerunner, without destroying 
the significance of the periodic differences has made the periods 
themselves all but, if not quite, temporally coextensive, each period 
expanding to cover the whole duration of history. . So much has 
evolution done, or is it doing, for a date-ridden history. 

But the retirement of dates, or temporal boundaries, has not 
always brought escape from the merely date-bounded period. The 
ghost of the departed still haunts many a historical record, and any 
ghost that really haunts the life which its bodily progenitor is sup- 
posed to have left is always more than a mere ghost. In some rare- 
fied form, a ray of moonlight perhaps or a gust of wind or a habit 
of mind, it still has flesh and blood. Thus the date-bounded period 
continues to haunt the study of history in the following flesh-and- 
blood ways ; subtle, if you please, but real and concrete too. To 
begin with, merely to lengthen a period may bring escape from the 
letter, but it cannot in itself bring escape from the real spirit of the 
period that begins and ends with a date. It may, of course it must 
increase indefinitely the material content, the manifold of events, 
which the period comprises, but more or less of a thing is not the 
last word to be said about it. Vital appreciation, for example, re- 
quires something besides the interesting discovery that America had 
figured in European history before 14Q2, or that Anaximander about 
600 B. C. said something concerning the importance of a prolonged 
infancy to human evolution which so brilliant a thinker as John 
Fiske discovered only thirty or forty years ago. To lengthen a 
period, then, though it makes more room, and so admits more cases, 
admitting as long a line of forerunners as you please, is not to avoid 
the evident materialism of mere length. Nor, further, does the his- 
torian necessarily escape the materialism of the date-bounded period 
when he seeks to relate a man or an event, a great thought or a 
great deed, to the environment, to the " times ", in which the ojie 



History and Materialism 737 

or the other has appeared. The " times " themselves may be with- 
out set time-barriers; usually in a loose way they are so made use 
of, their component factors or influences always having a value 
close to that of a timeless nature in organic evolution ; but only for- 
mally to relate a man or an event, a thought or a deed, to the 
" times ", however much the view may be broadened by so doing, 
though undoubtedly an advance materially, is not necessarily a real 
escape from a date-ridden history. It is so easy to see and treat the 
environment as if after all it were not the life of all time acting upon 
or through the life of the particular time. Thus, for illustration, in 
the statement that the trade-winds, not Columbus, discovered Amer- 
ica, some might see — falsely, I think — a reflection on the originality 
of the great navigator, but signally fail to see that temporally there 
was any difference of meaning between the two ways of describing 
the famous voyage. Yet the trade-winds presumptively are more, 
than an event of 1492 ; they were blowing at least a year or two 
even before Columbus was born, and rumor has it that they are 
sometimes active even at the present time. 

To leave the historian's use of the " times ", there is one more 
way in which he is capable of failing to free himself from the merely 
long — or short — period, and this perhaps is the most ghostly of the 
three. It is, then, the way of the would-be philosopher of history, 
who would relate human characters and events, laws and thoughts, 
institutions and movements, to underlying " presuppositions ", " con- 
cepts ", " Zeitgeister ", and the like, but who forgets, or certainly 
seems to forget, that such agents as these are doubly transcendent 
of their dates, exceeding or overreaching them at both ends, being, 
so to speak, at once ahead of and behind their times, and having 
accordingly a value very like that which has been seen to belong to 
environment. Possibly environment and the concept or the Zeitgeist 
are but the real or actual and the ideal expressions of the same fact, 
both being the medium in which past and future not only meet but 
also live and move in the present ; and if this be true of them, for 
the historian to treat either as only one more thing or fact to be cited 
in company with the other material data which his labors have un- 
earthed from the period under examination is to be materialistic, 
date-ridden, and all that, and is also almost ignominiously to miss 
the golden opportunity of his great industry. 

It fell to me recently to review a history of political theories of 
the ancient world. The author, as I fully appreciated, had made 
an important addition to the literature of his subject, but though 
claiming to supplement the work of an objective historian who had 
limited himself " to an account of political theories as they are to be 



738 A. H. Lloyd 

found crystallised and explicitly stated in literature ", and seeking 
accordingly beyond these bare facts to expose the theories as " pre- 
suppositions ", particularly as the " ideas implicit in the systems of 
governments and laws of the times and peoples considered ", and 
even striving after what should " resemble in some respects a philos- 
ophy of history ", he seemed to me to fall far short of his goal. It 
is true that the theories which he examined were shown with fair 
success to be only the formulated presuppositions of their times, but 
what I will call the dynamic value of such formulations received 
little if any attention. The theories, as presented, although appa- 
rently the presuppositions of the institutions of their times, were 
theories without the movement and vitality which every true pre- 
supposition upon formulation must have. A theory as the explicit 
rendering of an implicit idea must exceed its dates at both ends ; it 
must always be a solvent by which what has been becomes a party 
to what is to be, by which a passing view or manner of life or 
civilization is taken up into a rising view or manner of life or civiliza- 
tion. Its self-consciousness, its conceptual character, makes it in 
this way transitional, because through all the conditions of its formu- 
lation it has and holds the value of an exhortation, to individuals or 
to a people, really and fully to be henceforth what they have been, to 
be Greeks, perhaps, or Christians or Americans or in general to be 
men or to be really natural, and such an exhortation is plainly at 
once deeply reminiscent and provident or prophetic. At a time of 
great theories a lost and forgotten Golden Age and a Kingdom of 
Heaven to come vie with each other for the control of men's minds. 
Again, formulation of theory is only to do more or less deliberately 
what, so we are told, the drowning man does at a flash, namely, 
bring a long, in a sense a whole, past into the presence of the future. 
Consider, too, how all theorizing implies skepticism, and how skep- 
ticism, instead of destroying things, as people have sometimes 
imagined, only transforms them, turning objects of human worship, 
human treasures and devotions of all sorts, into mere natural or 
physical utilities ; and what can be more serviceable to history than 
such a transformation? Yet of this, and in general of the distinctly 
mediate function living in every theory, of the d\'namic value and 
the time-transcendent character of every responsible formulation of 
real presuppositions, of the historical movement in every explicit 
rendering of an implicit idea, the author of the book in review gave 
only the merest hints, \\niat, however, could be more essential to 
truly historical study? Events and ideas and ideas of ideas are 
always valuable data, but they do not necessarily make history ; or 
thev too often make onlv a materialistic history, a history that in 



History and Materialism 739 

fact, if not in conceit, is still under the bondage of the date-bounded 
period. Real history must have life, movement, dramatic character. 
Five marks of the possibility for materialism in history have now 
passed before our view, as follows : the self-repetition ; the swinging 
pendulum; the external or arbitrary, wholly revolutionary reaction; 
the progress that depends on absolute gains or losses and on in- 
vidious, Pharisaical distinctions ; and the date-bounded period. One 
more, a sixth and perhaps the most important of all, remains to be 
considered, before the direct charge of materialism against the his- 
tory of the present day, which will be remembered as the other 
special interest of this paper, can be examined. To this last mark of 
a materialistic history, then, I now turn, on account of its im- 
portance and peculiar interest giving it special treatment and special 
prominence.^ 

III. 

Sixthly, the historian is materialistic in that, or in so far as, he 
confuses what is merely a class-character with a well-rounded, all- 
sided, self-sufficient experience, that is to say, with the real, all- 
inclusive, vitally indivisible though perhaps indefinitely differ- 
entiable unity of experience. But what exactly does this mean? 
Apparently it is in form only a special rendering of the general 
definition of materialism with which this paper was introduced ; yet 
a class-character and the unity of experience — just what are these? 
And how much does their confusion, the habit or tendency of taking 
one for the other, really involve ? 

To speak first of the unity of experience, we have here an idea 
that properly is intended to be very comprehensive. The same com- 
prehensiveness might be claimed for the unity of life by a biologist 
or for the unity of force by a physical scientist or even for the unity 
of God by a theologian — at least by a theologian who had really 
studied both history and nature. The unity of experience is, quanti- 
tatively, the totality of all the relations, actual or possible, of man to 
himself or to his world. Man comprises, as we are so often told, 
a physical self, an intellectual self, and a moral and spiritual self. 
He comprises, again, feeling, cognition, and volition. He comprises, 
under still another analysis, a life that is natural, industrial, political, 
educational, esthetic, moral, and religious, and socially has developed 
institutions in which these different sides of his nature are especially 

' Of course even a list of six marks of materialistic tendencies in history is 
by no means exhaustive. Perhaps, among others that might be named and dis- 
cussed here, no one is more noteworthy than the idea of parallel histories. Polit- 
ical history, industrial history, ecclesiastical history, history of philosophy, his- 
tory of art or science, may not be treated as independent, though parallel, without 
materialism. 



740 A. H. Lloyd 

and distinctly expressed. The unity of experience, then, quantita- 
tively, is the totality of all of these relations, phases, parts, or func- 
tions of human nature, and, qualitatively, the mutual dependence, 
interaction, and determination among them all — in short, the vital, 
organic character, in distinction from the merely composite or aggre- 
gate character of the unity. In general, unity is qualitative as well 
as quantitative, and the unity of experience can be no exception to 
this general rule. 

Now, with regard to what is meant by a class-character, it is 
first to be observed that the unity of experience in its entirety is 
actively present in every individual. In fact, its active presence is, 
or seems to me to be, what chiefly constitutes personality. Further- 
more the unity of experience in its entirety is also actively present 
in the general environment. Environment might well be defined as 
the visible, material exemplification of all the different and various 
elements comprised in the unity of experience. True, between the 
person and the environment a great distinction exists. Thus, on 
the whole, that is to say, except for some one particular part or func- 
tion, the unity of experience is present in the former only impulsively, 
implicitly, or potentially ; or, to be perhaps more accurate, though 
there is really no difference in the meaning, only in an undeveloped 
form; while in the latter it exists explicitly or actually or more or 
less highly developed. But, in spite of this distinction, in both the 
unity of experience is present and is entirely real, its activity and 
reality in both being not at all incongruous with the suggested dif- 
ference of form between potentiality and actuality, between implicit 
and explicit expression, or between low and high development. 
Moreover, this first observation should apply to any of all the pos- 
sible analyses of human nature ; to those already given here of course, 
and to any other that might be given. 

fiut, in the next place, it is to be observed that between the per- 
son's potential and undeveloped and the environment's actual and 
developed expression of the unity of experience a class-life, a par- 
ticular social affiliation, which the person enjoys or suffers under, 
is always mediating. This class-life, however, or the class-character, 
upon which this life is based, from which it gets its peculiar form 
and interest, always does violence to the unity of experience. Class- 
differences are wide and deep-set ; a class-character comprises but 
one among, the many different parts or phases of experience and, 
except for the constraint provided through the wholeness, or all- 
sidedness, of the person on the one hand and the environment on the 
other hand, tends strongly to exclude all the others, so that, as per- 
haps the best way of recounting the situation now under analysis, 



Histoiy and Materialism 741 

class-life is nothing more or less than a hotbed of specialism. Con- 
clusively, then — and just this is the point to be emphasized in the 
present discussion — the relation of a class-character to the unity of 
experience is always the relation of the particular to the general or 
more exactly of the part to tlie ivhole, but of the former in developed 
to the latter in a generally undeveloped form ; and, as was said, his- 
tory is therefore materialistic in so far as it confuses the two. 

In illustration ef what is intended by this account of the relation 
of the class-character to the unity of experience, the individual is 
personally emotional, cognitional, and volitional, or physical, mental, 
and spiritual, or natural, industrial, political, educational, esthetic, 
moral, and religious, or conservative and radical, honest and dis- 
honest, all in one, but socially, that is, in respect to his particular 
class-alliance, he is only one of the things comprised in any of those 
groups. Moreover, what he is socially he is under conditions of 
some special training or special development ; and also whatever he 
is socially gives direction and mediation to all the other relatively 
undeveloped sides of his nature. Does he belong, for example, to 
the class of mechanics ? Then, while receiving the advantages of such 
association in the way of traditions, prestige, institutional support 
and education, technical skill, and the like, he will also, though with- 
out the same skill and without the other special advantages, be re- 
ligious, intellectual, political, in his life of a mechanic or with refer- 
ence to the instruments that make that life possible. Does he belong 
to the class of thieves? Then, while practising the talented arts of 
the thief's calling, he will also, though without training and ethical 
sophistication, be honest at least toward his companions. Does he 
belong among the natural scientists? He will make, so to speak, a 
religion or an industry of his science, though he will lack and pos- 
sibly even resent, as he sees it in others, the professional manner of 
any member of the distinctly religious or the distinctly industrial 
class. Finally, for just one more illustration, is he socially conserva- 
tive? Then, though not deliberately and certainly not with any 
avowal of intention, he is also given to temporizing with the estab- 
lished law, not merely to slighting it, but even to transgressing its 
provisions actively. However law-abiding any individual may be 
socially or institutionally, personally every individual is in some 
measure a lawbreaker ; or, conversely, however radical and anarchical 
any one may be socially, personally every one is loyal to some prin- 
ciple of control. 

In short, as these illustrations all indicate, any one of all possible 
class-characters shows, not what some have and others in society 
have not, but what all have, some however in developed, others in 



742 A. H. Lloyd 

only undeveloped form, some actually and conspicuously, others only 
potentially and in a sense privateh'. When the personal and the 
social are both taken into account, every creature in human society 
is seen to belong, either actually or potentially, publicly or privately, 
to all the classes of society. All men are all things together : all are 
scientists and mechanics and politicians and worshipers ; good men 
and bad ; conservatives and radicals ; hedonists and rigorists ; wise 
men and fools ; thinkers and artists and road-menders : either per- 
sonally or professionally all are all these things together, and if some 
class-alliance be a condition of every man's existence, then at least 
one thing every man is socially and professionally. Also, as the new 
term just used, and I think properly used, will suggest, the special 
materialism of history here in review may now be said to consist in 
failure to distinguish between the personal and the professional ex- 
pression of experience. The personal expression of anything com- 
prised in experience is never without some direct constraint from, 
or immediate vital relationship to, the other things comprised in ex- 
perience, while the professional expression of the same thing is, or 
always strongly tends to be, under conditions of isolation and 
assumed self-sufficiency. Witness, with regard to the latter, the 
professional ideas of " business on strictly business principles ", " art 
just for art's sake ", " science as pure science ", " religion as a sacred, 
unworldly cult ", with which personal interest is always in conflict. 
No class-alliance, no connection with an institution, no professional 
life in itself, can ever full}' satisfy all the demands of personality. 
Also, even the persistent, private, personal expression of such sides 
of life as the special profession neglects is not enough to make up 
the deficiency. It is not enough because of the coincident conflict 
between the developed and the undeveloped sides of the person's 
nature. But, this latter point aside, for history to assume that a 
profession is self-sufficient, the profession of conservatism perhaps 
or of radicalism, of science or of politics, of labor or of any particular 
nationalism, such as the Greek, Russian, English, or American, or 
of any particular religionism, such even as the Christian, is to be, 
under the definition, materialistic. 

Perhaps all this is too simple and commonplace to need so much 
attention. Perhaps a straw-history will seem more than ever to be 
in possession of my mind. But, be this as it may, my logical in- 
stincts lead me boldly on. One or two conclusions or corollaries 
that may not be hopelessly commonplace are pressing for recognition, 
and with brief reference to them I promise to bring the examination 
of this sixth mark of materialism to a close. 

History is plainly an aft'air of the whole ; it is nothing more nor 



History and Materialism ^4.^ 

less than the self-maintenance and development of the unity of ex- 
perience; and this maintenance involves with equal necessity and 
significance the person, the class, and the totality — under whatever 
name, society, humanity, nature, or environment — to which the 
person and his including class belong. Without all three of these, 
taken of course in connection with such other divisions or sub- 
divisions as they are types of, the maintenance would be impossible : 
history would and could have neither vitality nor continuity, neither 
real movement nor real unity. 

History is an affair of the whole, and at least to avoid materialism 
it should feel itself in this character. To accept any form of an iso- 
lated individualism, personal, factional, or national, as for example 
in the notion that the individual has anything like a freedom of 
indifference to conditions, or in the idea that any nation has a really 
indivisible or inalienable sovereignty, or that the natural state is not 
a universal state, is to lose sight of its real character and to miss its 
greatest chance for real vitality. 

And just because history is an affair of the whole I think, and I 
wish especially to say, that above all else the person is necessary to 
history. The class, or the totality of the classes, is indeed con- 
spicuous for insuring a high technical or professional development 
for every side of human nature. Also the conflict of classes insures 
a constant check upon the disruption of experience which the class- 
specialism must always threaten. But in such conflict the check has 
an external, apparently arbitrary character, and the life which it 
serves lacks in consequence direct, positive integrity. Only through 
the person, who is himself the living, urgent unity of experience even 
to the inclusion of all its differences and conflicts, can human history 
ever secure its ever-accruing inheritance. Perhaps between the 
person and society, or the environment generally, there is such a 
difference as division of labor always induces. Perhaps personality 
is peculiarly organizing in its function, having in its nature more 
unity than difference, while the environment, on the other hand, as 
manifested in its social classes or let me even say in its different 
kingdoms, is peculiarly dififerentiating, having more division than 
unity. On such a plan the two would ever work together for the 
rnaintenance and productiveness of experience. But this is only a 
suggestion, that may seem too philosophical for ordinary con- 
sumption, and it will suffice if the person is seen to have a real place 
in history. 

History, I say again, needs the person. The movement of the 
whole of experience, of all its actual and possible relations, within 

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. X. 48. ' 



744 A. H. Lloyd 

the compass of the single personal individual makes natural and 
necessary, directly and vitally necessary, the application of any 
special attainment, which some class-affiliation has accomplished, 
beyond the particular sphere of its development. That such applica- 
tion is born of what essentially is genius will doubtless occur to 
every one. What is genius but just the capacity of translating one 
side of life, with its special attainment of skill and insight, into other 
sides or all sides of life? — and this capacity lies at the very heart of 
personality. This capacity, too, makes leadership, the partial or 
the complete liberation of the unity of experience, on the plane of 
some special development, in the life of a single individual. The 
person, in short, is born to translate and lead. All persons have some 
part in the genius of leadership. 

History, I must say just once more, needs the person. Personality 
as a living, integral expression of the whole of experience, as pos- 
sessing a natural capacity or genius for leadership, bridges all the 
chasms of history ; the chasms of race, of caste, of epoch ; of nation- 
ality, of party, of any form of division of human nature. Can leader- 
ship be anything else but the breaking down of the social barriers, 
geographical or historical, spacial or temporal ? Has it ever failed to 
make one out of two? Personal leadership renders opposition, as 
manifested in the " vibrations " and " reactions " of history, only the 
competition of different sides or relations of human nature, not the 
struggle of classes and interests that have independent existence and 
that are not in consequence parts of a real unity of experience. 
Socially, as war of class with class or time with time, no conflict may 
seem solvable, but personally no conflict is unsolvable. Personality, 
sphere as it is of the whole differential operation that makes human 
life at any time and that has made human history, can even trans- 
late enemies into friends, victors into the vanquished, slaves into 
masters. Again, class-life may feed on difference, but for the per- 
son analogy is the staff of life, and to him accordingly, even when 
the constraints of his own class and time are strongest, all classes 
and all times, all parts and all sides of human nature, speak, different 
dialects perhaps, but the same language. More directly, then, than 
the common, natural environment, and more vitally than any abstract 
thought or formula, personality links the differences of history 
together in a truly living whole. What class has not had its leader ? 
What people has not had its prophet? What great period has not 
had both its personal forerunner and its reformer? And leader, 
prophet, forerunner, and reformer have all shown how personality 
ever bridges the chasms of history. 

If here some one objects that bridging the chasms of history 



Histoiy and Materialism 745 

makes for continuity and so gives meaning to the idea of history- 
repeating itself, it is only necessary to reply, or rather to repeat, that 
no denial of meaning to this idea was made or intended. History 
is not continuous in the sense of the monotonous repetition of any 
one thing or of any number or series of different things, but only in 
the sense of single, persistent activity whose movement through its 
differentiations is always one of positive growth, of qualitative, not 
merely quantitative variation. So to speak, no new period can ever 
be more or less than analogously or metaphorically a reproduction 
of what has preceded it. Class and person acting together secure the 
development, that makes the metaphors, to the unity of experience, 
with whose maintenance or constant realization history has been 
identified. 

And, for a last word under this sixth topic, a word that 
may be quite uncalled for, clearly the person is never a being 
outside and apart. Self-sufficiency can come to him only in so 
far as he lives and moves and has his very being in and with the 
life at large. How could the unity of experience or of nature, 
which is always alive in the person, ever be external to its parts 
in the classes that make up society or, for that matter, that make up 
the environment as a whole? The whole trend of what has been 
found here in regard to the relation of the person to separate class- 
characters, of the unity of experience to its professional develop- 
ments, that are only parts or phases of experience, is strictly against 
any such idea. Emphatically the person, necessary to history, is 
personal in and with the life that encompasses him, not outside of it, 
not over and above it. To treat him as by himself, as outside, would 
be, not perhaps apparently to take a part for a self-sufficient whole, 
but — in the end the same thing — to make of the whole only another 
part. 

IV. 

And now, having completed the exposure of some of the ways in 
which history may be materialistic, having even allowed myself from 
time to time to imply that in certain of those ways history to-day at 
least conventionally, if not actually, is materialistic, I turn at last to 
the special charge of materialism as it is issued against the current 
study of history. Curiously enough, this special charge hardly has 
directly in mind any of the six marks of the offense that I have 
given ; on the contrary its attention has been largely to the emphasis 
which is being put on prosaic details, natural laws, material condi- 
tions, and the like ; so that at first thought I shall doubtless seem to 
have gone needlessly out of my way, bothering my head with what 
nobody appears ever to have meant by materialism. But the fact 



746 A. H. Lloyd 

is, as has indeed been suggested already, that just such an excursion 
is always necessary, whenever the real meaning, in distinction from 
the ordinary understanding or application of anything, is in question. 
Such an excursion brings returns that have a peculiarly effective 
utility for the end in view. Nor is the situation altered at all by the 
circumstance that the excursion leads into the jungle, into the region 
where the enemy has his lair. Nothing is ever so near to being 
well understood as when even its critics are found, however pettily, 
to be guilty of it. 

Thus, for the case in hand, the various marks of materialism 
which have been dwelt upon here have represented what on the 
whole have been the idea and the practice of those who are most 
ready to cry out against the materialistic historian of the day. Cer- 
tainly the up-to-date historian has been less openly given to them 
than those who attack him. His critics, boastfully idealistic, have 
held quite tenaciously to just such things as the literal repetition, the 
sudden clear-sky reaction, the isolated period, the exclusive class or 
caste, the imearthly, heaven-sent genius, and the immaterially free 
common person. They have thought of progress, in just the way 
that all these things imply, as moving on in jerks and starts of 
accretion and rejection and as temporally only a series of periods 
that have no natural dealings with each other. And so, although 
their heads may have been in the sphere, perhaps the clouds, of the 
ideal, their feet have been planted squarely and firmly on what, at 
least under the definition, has the moist, earthy odor of materialism. 
But, over against his critics, the up-to-date historian has managed 
largely to free himself from their special conceits. Progress seems 
on the whole indifferent to him. Reaction and class and period and 
the rest are little if anything niore than forms of thought, conven- 
tions, useful points of view with the value of working hypotheses 
rather than of fixed, objective realities. So far, then, he would seem 
even to have some advantage over his detractors. 

But the up-to-date historian has a materialism of his own. which, 
though not always in full, open expression, is at least very real as 
a tendency with him, and taken for what it tends to be it is related to 
that of his detractors very much as the general to the particular or as 
the whole to its parts or special cases. In the first place, his useful 
forms of thought or hypothetical standpoints have at least the reality 
of conventions or ghosts, and, with these ghosts about, the moist, 
earthy odor, though possibly much attenuated, must still persist — 
perhaps, if I may extend the figure, not without suggestions of the 
tomb. But especially, in the second place, he makes h\-postasis, not 
indeed of a class or period or person, but of the substance which is 



History and Materialism 747 

called matter. Often in the world of his thinking this substance 
travels incognito. Now it is nature ; now the universal environment ; 
now natural law — whether physical or ps3'chological ; and now fate, 
or even history — in the sense of a single, all-inclusive, self-per- 
petuating process that stampedes everything happening in its way ; 
but in fact, if not in name, it is always matter. And because it is 
matter and because before- matter all things are equal, prosaic details 
of the minutest sort are studied with great patience and with an 
amazing lack of humor and perspective. Because it is matter, too, 
and because as matter it is made to stand off and apart in an arbitrary 
independence, the up-to-date historian, though not in the smaller 
ways of his boastfully idealistic critics, is given to materialism. 
True, with only matter to consider, this being single in process and 
in law, his history can really have only one period and be the history 
of only one class of beings, but it is still materialistic, because it treats 
the great whole as if it were only another part, as if something were 
still outside of it, as if it were a fatal process imposing itself upon 
human life and robbing mankind of the last vestiges of interest and 
initiative. In a word the materialism, real as a tendency if not as 
a fully developed practice, of present-day histor)', is only the great 
materialism that has taken into itself all the others ; the great beast 
or leviathan, that has swallowed all the smaller beasts, and has taken 
them in or swallowed them without assimilating them, without — 
could anything be so lacking in sense of humor ? — learning the simple, 
easy lesson of all-inclusiveness. The ghosts of all it has devoured 
still look out through its unnatural eyes. 

Why. unnatural eyes ? Because of the ghosts ? Doubtless ; but 
especially because of the lesson unlearned though so obvious. Those 
eyes are looking at what they refuse to see. They are looking at 
the whole without seeing that the whole cannot be outside of any- 
thing ; at natural process, or history, without seeing that, if really 
all-inclusive, it cannot possibly be fate to anj'thing ; at material data 
or conditions, without seeing that the conditions can show only what 
life is, not what it has to be in spite of itself ; or at necessity, without • 
seeing that a recognized necessity cannot be more or less than a well- 
developed opportunity, that just because known the law that sug- 
gests necessity is evidence only of a real, substantial freedom already 
developed in the life of the knowers. 

The special charge of materialism against history, then, is not 
without point. Moreover, it is true to the definition that was given 
here, for history has tended to treat its whole as if only another 
part. But the chief reproach in the charge is not so much the 
materialism as what I will call the superstition of materialism, the 



748 A. H. Lloyd 

illusion of the independent, arbitrary whole, from which it shows the 
historian to be suffering. Thus, in my opinion, the up-to-date his- 
tory has been more superstitious than genuinely materialistic ; perhaps 
because under the hypnotic influence of its critics, it has taken its 
materialism of the whole too seriously, assuming in consequence a 
false position, seeing or fearing to see what has no reality in fact, 
supposing fate, necessity, outside compulsion, or determination, 
where none can possibly exist. 

I have no desire to be needlessly subtle, although for a moment 
I may now appear so. Under the definition of materialism, a 
materialism of the whole should somehow end in what a scientist 
might call the precipitation of something new or different, and only 
the persistence of the illusion or superstition referred to above can 
possibly prevent such an outcome. Thoroughness or wholeness, so 
to speak, constitutes a state of saturation ; it makes the materialism 
too inclusive to remain intact, and under such conditions a precipitate 
should be looked for. The precipitate of a materialism of the 
whole, then, is — in lack of a better name — idealism; not of course 
the illusive idealism of the critics and detractors of history, not the 
idealism whose strength has lain in an opposition to materialism, 
but the idealism that comes with and through materialism as a 
natural consequence of real wholeness supplanting partiality. 

Details, material conditions, and natural laws are all pertinent 
interests of history ; but the materialistic illusion of the independent, 
arbitrary whole, before which all details are equal and conditions and 
laws mean external necessity and blind fate, has threatened to rob 
history of its proper interest and vitality, making it materialistic, 
when just by reason of its present tendencies, just because of its 
thoroughness, its regard to details, and its study of laws, it has a 
right to be deeply and genuinely idealistic. Recognition of this right 
would lead, I venture to believe and I have written this long article 
chiefly to say, to such a change in history as the stereoscope works 
upon a fiat picture ; it would give perspective where perspective has 
'been lacking; dramatic movement — without loss of scientific vir- 
tuosity, where there has been only process or law. 

The idea of the experience-whole, of the unity of experience, 
made much of in a preceding section, here comes to my aid. as I 
conclude. It led, as will be remembered, to emphasis of the impor- 
tance of the perSon, in whom all the elements of experience were 
moving with greater or less power, with higher or lower develop- 
ment, and now, as the materialistic illusion of the independent whole 
is dispelled, as its precipitate, idealism, comes to view, the same 
emphasis is again possible. Thus, the idea of the unity of experience 



History and Materialism 749 

suggests very clearly that in experience matter — under its own name 
or under any of its disguises — may have either one of two meanings. 
It may be a special thing, a distinct group of phenomena, or a gen- 
eral function capable of as many applications or expressions as there 
are relations in experience. Let me explain. 

As to the first of the two meanings : if human nature in its 
unity does indeed include a physical part, then the outside physical 
or material world, details, conditions, laws, and all, can be but the 
special, isolated, why not say with real appreciation even the fac- 
tional and technical and professional development of just that part, 
and as in general so here the genius of personality, ever quick with 
the whole unity of experience, or of human nature, is constantly 
reaping for its whole self the advantage of this particular profes- 
sional development and association. How else justify natural 
poetry or art? or natural religion? How explain mechanical inven- 
tion with its wonderful applications of material, natural resources to 
all sorts of human ends and purposes? How account for the sails 
and ships and the navigator's devices in general that enabled the 
trade-winds to discover America? 

But, secondly, matter may be, and I think in actual use has ,had 
all the value of being, something more relative or more general, and 
therefore less tangible and specific than this. In my opinion it has 
often stood, not for a distinct thing, not for a specific and more or 
less independent group of phenomena, the so-called outer, material 
world, but rather for a very general relationship, in a word, for so 
much of reality as is concerned with maintaining, relatively to any 
one side of life, all other sides of life in the unity of experience. 
So regarded, it has the character of the general restraint that the 
unity of experience is always putting upon each and every expression 
of specialism and, as was suggested, it will have as many specific 
expressions as experience shows tendencies to specific development. 
Also, in this character, to recall the distinction that was used before, 
matter will be directly vital and personal — just for being such a 
general function in the unity of experience — rather than professional 
and fixedly specific as under the first meaning remarked here. So 
to speak, it will be a role in which every element of personal expe- 
rience will have some part. Perhaps the fact that even the outer 
material world as men think of it is a decidedly ambiguous thing, 
being now the special world of technical physical science and now 
the world that includes, relatively to any one human being, all other 
human beings as well as all other classes and races, all other animals, 
all other things that live, and all other merely existent objects, 
may be cited in illustration and evidence of what is intended by the 



SEP S3 1905 



750 A. H. Lloyd 

idea of matter as of double meaning, as now a distinct, separate 
thing, specially and professionally developed, and now a general 
function vital to and in personality. Perhaps, too, it is worth while 
to add that in environment, nature, natural selection, the biologist 
must recognize, and to a certain extent has recognized, the same 
distinction between specific thing and general function, between the 
separate group of external phenomena and the vital function that 
belongs within every organism. Such an addition seems especially 
worth while because the historian and the evolutionist are bound 
to have a common interest. 

But we now have before our view the two meanings of matter 
which the idea of the unity of experience has suggested. There is 
matter as the profession, class, or " kingdom ", and there is matter 
as the function in personality ; and it is hardly necessary to say that 
these two meanings are not at all incongruous. Simply they are 
both involved in the maintenance and development of experience. 
With apologies for the repetition, they are only a very general, 
perhaps the most general and most inclusive expression of the impor- 
tant difference, noted above, between the class-character and the 
unity of experience, between the technical and the personal expres- 
sion of anything ; and they show that a materialism of the whole not 
only precipitates idealism but also restores the person to history. 

The person, member of all classes, or kingdoms, possesses vitally 
the whole ; this whole permeates his entire nature. ^laterialism 
may deny him such membership and such possession, but idealism, 
coming with removal of the illusion of the independent whole, 
restores them. In the person history is seen to be an afi'air of the 
whole and to be at the same time vital, not fatal, not mechanical. 
And so history may gain anew the humanity and dramatic interest 
that to many it has appeared in serious danger of losing. 

Alfred H. Lloyd. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



018 461 755 9 



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